NOTICED; A Star Without Dialogue

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: June 24, 2012

TO date, no tour buses have been sighted outside Caf?rumpy, the real-life coffee shop at 193 Meserole Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the fictional Hannah serves up lattes and attitude on the HBO series ''Girls,'' which concluded its first season last Sunday. But give it time.

Bloggers and fans of Lena Dunham's breakout series, which chronicles the nowhere jobs and ambiguous hookups among 20-something trustafarians in New York, have set the stage for a ''Sex and the City''-style tour by compiling online maps of the actual bars, boutiques, street corners and apartments where the show takes place.

Location-spotting is an engaging parlor game for young fans who, like the characters, double up in cramped Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan apartments: Hey, wasn't that BabyCakes vegan bakery on Broome Street on Episode 4?

Knowing this Williamsburg street corner from that one is a way for fans who fit squarely in the ''Girls'' demographic to show off their expertise in the subculture of Brooklyn loft parties and graffiti-art shows that spawned the show.

Take a slide show of ''Girls'' locations on Crushable, a celebrity blog by a Brooklynite named Jamie Peck. She zeroed in on the infamous McKibbin lofts in East Williamsburg, and her former home, as the apparent location of the party on Episode 7, where Shoshanna accidentally smokes crack.

''It's a good-enough fit for the show,'' she wrote, explaining there are ''lots of parties there.''

''But I've never seen anyone smoke crack at any of them, because hipster kids don't do crack,'' she added, ''not even ironically.''

On Brokelyn, a local news and culture blog, the writer Faye Penn dissected the wardrobe worn by Hannah, played by Ms. Dunham, culled from the vintage stores Beacon's Closet and Atlantis Attic in Williamsburg. She fretted about the fashion statement that Hannah's frumpy struggling-novelist look was sending to audiences outside the city's hipper-than-thou enclaves. ''All the world will be judging Brooklyn ladies by those white socks, that hopelessly boxy coat,'' she wrote.

In crowd-source fashion, fans have added their own drop pins to a ''Girls'' Google Map created by WNYC and The Guardian, which has been linked to by countless blogs and news sites, including Free Williamsburg, The Huffington Post and Mashable.

One drop pin points to the Jane hotel in the West Village, where Hannah confronts her nemesis Tally at a book party in Episode 9. Another points to Weather Up, a bar for devotees of artisanal cocktails and ironic mustaches, which Hannah incorrectly says is in Cobble Hill in Episode 2. (Ms. Dunham, who was quoted by Gothamist saying, ''I was literally looking at a map of Brooklyn while I was writing,'' apologized after a chorus of bloggers pointed out that the bar is actually in Prospect Heights.)

In some cases, bloggers noted, the show reflected simmering tensions in the city's young creative quarters, using locations as a metaphor. In Episode 8, the venture capitalist Thomas-John invites Jessa and Marnie back to his glassy condo for a m?ge ?rois. Aptly, the scene unfolded in Edge, one of those luxury waterfront towers in Williamsburg that the local cognoscenti loathe.

True to young women's bohemian allegiances, they soon find the whole thing creepy and ''give VC-man the stiff-arm after they've made out on his expensive rug, and then spill wine on it,'' wrote Curbed, a real estate blog. ''Is this a plus or a minus in the marketing column for The Edge?''

Given that this show about four single New York women is endlessly compared to ''Sex and the City,'' it seems natural to wonder if tour companies might organize bus treks around the ''Girls'' stamping grounds.

Last Tuesday, the question was put to Georgette Blau, the owner of On Location Tours. Her Manhattan-based company has turned pockets of the West Village into a tourist trap of sorts by ferrying busloads of would-be Carries from Cleveland to ''Sex and the City'' haunts like the Magnolia Bakery and the Pleasure Chest erotic shop.

''It is very interesting that you ask that question,'' Ms. Blau said. ''Approximately 37 minutes ago, we had that discussion.''